>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience?

IME, yes.

I'm currently working as an SRE supporting a large environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In terms of issues or incidents we deal with that are directly caused by cloud provider problems, I'd estimate that 80-90% come from Azure. And we're _really_ not doing anything that complicated in terms of cloud infrastructure; just VMs, load balancers, some blob storage, some k8s clusters.

Stuff on Azure just breaks constantly, and when it does break it's very obvious that Azure:

1. Does not know when they're having problems (it can take weeks/months for Azure to admit they had an outage that impacted us)

2. Does not know why they had problems (RCAs we're given are basically just "something broke")

3. Does not care that they had problems

Everyone I work with who interacts with Azure at all absolutely loathes it.

As a former MSFTy it does sound weird to me too. I didn’t see what Axels level was but a lot of people work for Microsoft and not many of them can expect to email the CEO and get a response. It seems a bit like a crash out, not the first I’ve seen levied at Azure, won’t be the last. They probably think it’s a mental health episode, if you’re an important CEO crazy people will email you all the time and the staff probably filter them out before they see it. Also this is a lot of internal gossip, I would be worried that airing this publicly would impinge on future career opportunities, even healthy orgs would appreciate some discretion.

I’m sure everything he said is completely true, Azure is one of the few tech stacks I refuse to work with and the predominant reason I left.

If you’ve joined an org and nothing works the reason is usually that the org is dysfunctional and there is often very little you can do about it, and you’re probably not the first person who’s tried and failed at it.

In my experience Azure is full of consistency issues and race conditions. It's enough of an issue that I was talking about new OpenAI models becoming available via Bedrock on AWS and how convenient that was since I wouldn't have to deal with Azure and my colleague in enterprise architecture went on an unprompted rant about these exact issues. It's not the first time something like this has happened and I've experienced these issues first hand, so yes. I'd say reliability is a critical issue for Azure and it hasn't gotten better each time I've gone back to check.

I recall seeing some pretty damning reports from a security pentester that was able to escape from a container on Azure and found the management controller for the service was years old with known critical unpatched vulnerabilities. Always been a bit sceptical of them since then

What I meant is that it’s customary to write to the Board through the Secretary as opposed to write directly or through some other channel.

Large orgs make decisions that prioritize short-term metrics over long-term quality all the time and nobody tracks whether those tradeoffs actually paid off. The decision to ship fast and fix later sounds reasonable in a meeting setting until articles like this surface and the reality comes through clearly.

I am sort of confused how NDA and such agreements employees sign would allow for an employee to post such an article without being sued by Microsoft?

> What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility.

I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen.

The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly.

But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way. One one team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.

It wasn't even a talent thing, Windows development skills are a career dead end outside of Microsoft. They used to be a hot commodity, and Microsoft was able to hire the best of the best from industry. Now they have to train people up, and Microsoft doesn't offer any of the employment perks that they used to use to attract top talent (Seattle used to be a low CoL area, everyone had private offices, job stability).

When I started at Microsoft in 2007, the interview bar included deep knowledge of how computers worked. It wasn't unusual to have meetings drop down to talking about assembly code. Your first day after orientation was a bunch of computer parts and you were told to "figure out how to setup your box".

Antivirus wasn't mandatory. The logic was if you got a virus, they made a mistake hiring you and you deserved to be fired.

When your average developer can go that deep on any topic, you can generally leave engineers well enough alone and get good software.

Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.

Yes it is that unreliable. Even when given free credits, I would rather pay for the offerings from Amazon/Google.

The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.

He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?

Azure is when you have a different version of the same product/api in each region.